Screen 5: Bank Account

The customer’s identity is now confirmed. The next question the system needs to answer is: where does this person’s money live? Every trading account must be linked to a verified bank account — this is how funds move in and out. The customer enters three fields (account number, IFSC code, and account type), and the system immediately fires a penny drop to verify that the account exists and belongs to the person whose name is on the KYC (Know Your Customer) application. This is one of the few screens where the customer provides genuinely new information that cannot be pre-filled from any external source.

5 Bank Account

Purpose: Capture bank account details and verify ownership via penny drop.

Bank account verification via IMPS credit (penny drop) validates account holder name. The system sends Re.1 (one rupee) via IMPS to the customer’s bank account. The bank responds with the account holder’s name, which the system then matches against the name from DigiLocker (Government of India’s digital document platform). This proves the account exists, is active, and belongs to the right person.

User Input

The customer types three fields. The IFSC code triggers an automatic lookup that fills in the bank and branch details.

Field	Field Code	Validation
Account Number	G01	Numeric, bank-specific length
IFSC Code	G03	11 chars: [A-Z]{4}0[A-Z0-9]{6}
Account Type	G07	Savings / Current

Auto-filled from IFSC (RBI Master)

The moment the customer enters a valid IFSC code, these fields populate automatically from the RBI (Reserve Bank of India) IFSC Master directory. The customer does not type any of these.

Field	Source
Bank Name	RBI IFSC Master
Branch Name	RBI IFSC Master
Branch City	RBI IFSC Master
MICR Code	RBI IFSC Master

Penny Drop verification fires on submit — Rs.1 IMPS credit + name match scoring. IFSC Lookup also fires.

Why penny drop and not just account number validation?

An account number alone proves nothing — it is just a sequence of digits. The penny drop proves three things simultaneously: the account exists at the given IFSC, the account is active and can receive funds, and the name on the account matches the KYC applicant. This is why SEBI (Securities and Exchange Board of India) and exchanges require bank verification as a mandatory step.

Penny Drop Result

The penny drop result feeds into the Blocking Gate (Screen 8). The gate requires that the account holder name passes verification against the applicant’s name from DigiLocker/Aadhaar records.

Result	Action
Name passes verification	Pass — proceed to e-Sign
Name does not pass verification	Block — manual review required
Transaction failed	Block — retry or alternate verification

For vendor implementation options for bank account verification, see Vendor Integrations.

Bank account verification edge cases

Some banks have delayed IMPS processing, especially smaller cooperative banks and regional rural banks. If the penny drop does not return within a reasonable window, the system should queue it for retry rather than failing immediately. Also, name mismatches are common when the bank records use abbreviated names (e.g., “S. Kumar” vs. “Suresh Kumar”) — this is why a fuzzy name matching algorithm is required rather than an exact string comparison.